Sorry I’ve been so quiet recently. I was very busy in early summer – putting the finishing touches on some new designs for a book I am writing (which I’ll tell you all about in a short while) and preparing for Cheshire Fibre Festival workshops.

So I took a much needed holiday to recover. We travelled up to Scotland via Northumbria; I haven’t been to Scotland on holiday for a very long time and it is almost as long since I last visited Northumbria. These are both very beautiful parts of the British Isles and generally much quieter than the rest of the UK in summer.

Scotland was lovely, with quiet roads and resorts. We stayed at Pitlochry and Grantown-on-Spey, both beautiful Scottish towns set in lovely scenery. We saw lochs and rivers, mountains and valleys and everything inbetween, even some pipers! And we travelled as far as the Moray coast. This coastline is stunningly beautiful, if a little windswept from the North Sea, with banks of shingle and miles of golden sands.

We travelled back to Northumbria via the Snow Roads – a fabulous scenic route taking us along some of the highest public roads in the UK and some amazing landscapes. At the end of the 90 mile route we felt we had seen all of Scotland!

In Northumbria we re-visited Holy Island, Bamburgh Castle and Cragside, all just as lovely now as years ago.

Of course, I can’t take a holiday without checking if there are any yarn shops in the area. So I went armed with a list of shops I could visit. Unfortunately we were never always in the right place at the right time to visit them all (confession – I had 8 shops on my list!) and only managed to visit one. This was an amazing find – Karelia House. It was more remote than I expected, off a single-track road, and I would say it was more a craft barn than a shop and with a lovely café. It had sewing machines, haberdashery, fabric and a wide range of yarn. This is my haul:

I came home feeling quite refreshed and ready to tackle the next stage of the book, more about that in a while 🙂 Meanwhile, this is a bowl of my momentoes from Scotland: